Thursday, August 29, 2013

GOD IS POWERFUL BUT DOES "GOD" = "POWER"? WHAT DO WE WORSHIP & WHY?

An Excerpt from Ch. 5 of God Of Our Silent Tears -- a chapter on several things God is not. God of Our Silent Tears is now available from the Cathedral Bookstore (Los Angeles). http://cathedral-bookstore.myshopify.com/products/god-of-our-silent-tears Atheist philosopher David Hume and his
successors have defined God in terms of only two characteristics – goodness and
power, with “power” being understood as total dominance or control. That power
is what makes him God. Well, that is a seriously flawed understanding of God
and it makes “the problem of evil” intractable. Feminist theologians call that
image of God “patriarchal.” They are not necessarily rejecting the image of God
as “father.” “Patriarchal” here means God as dominator, God as autocrat. The
patriarchal God is God because he is omnipotent.
God’s literal omnipotence is the lynchpin of “the problem of evil” and the
erroneous assumption in all the flawed attempts to answer the problem of evil.

It
is an oddly philosophical and peculiarly Greek notion about God, this
“omnipotence” – but it is one of the most widely accepted beliefs about God,
even to the extent of understanding that God is God because God is omnipotent,
that “God” means one who is omnipotent. If you and yours are free of this patriarchal
God image, “the problem of evil” is probably not troublesome for you. But because
most people assume that divinity equals omnipotence, that patriarchal picture
of God persists as the lynchpin of “the problem of evil.”

Bart
Ehrman, in describing why he cannot believe in God, assumes that if God did
exist, he would prove it by intervening in the world to impose his will. Even
sophisticated theologians are not exempt. Their “doctrine of God” chapters
generally show a much richer sense of who God is. But that is not the God who
shows up in their “doctrine of evil” chapters. When it comes to this issue,
even theologians who should know better lapse into patriarchal assumptions. If
you do not share those assumptions at all, then feel free to skip on to the
next chapter. But if your image of God is to any degree snared in the
prevailing cultural definition of God as dominating power, then we need to
clear up a few things.

First,
the very concept of omnipotence is not to be found in Scripture. We have
expanded the Biblical description of God as “almighty” into this notion of
omnipotence. However, “almighty” in the Bible means “most powerful” – not
literally omnipotent. The President of the United States is the “most powerful”
political leader in the world, but that does not make him omnipotent in global
politics. Omnipotence is not a Hebrew concept. It comes from the Greek
philosophical preference for absolute terms. The doctrine of absolute literal
omnipotence is not supported by Scripture. In the Bible, things usually do not
go God’s way. If things always accorded with God’s will in the Bible, the
Divine would be in a better mood and would not have come off as so irritable in
the prophets.

In
addition to being without Scriptural basis, absolute omnipotence does not make
sense. I was once teaching a Great Books course to college freshmen who were
greatly fond of their subjectivity. They were forever insisting that each of us
has our own truth, our own right, our own wrong, and that no one should impose
any kind of belief on another. At last the curriculum allowed me to ambush
their subjectivity with Euclid. A student went to the board and proved by
indubitable logic Euclid’s theorem that parallel lines do not intersect. I
questioned the class as to whether this might be true. “Yes” they said, “it is
true.” On cross-examination they held that it would be true even if a majority
of us should vote that parallels lines henceforth would intersect. They held
that no government could change this truth by decree, and that it had always
and everywhere been true and would always be so, even in Singapore and Sweden.
But when I asked them, “And what if God should decide that parallel lines
intersect?” fully half the class insisted that then parallel lines would
intersect despite the logical impossibility. Omnipotence leads people to say
and think the strangest things!

Analytical
philosophers point out that the notion of literal omnipotence is simply
nonsense – “internally incoherent” is their term for it.[i]
They demonstrate the senselessness of the word by asking questions such as,
“Can God build a rock so big God cannot pick it up?”

Orthodox
doctrines of the Church have never made such silly claims about God. The
leading authorities in theology, the people who have defined the boundaries of
the Church’s faith, have always acknowledged that God’s “omnipotence” does not
mean God can do anything which is either logically inconsistent or foreign to
God’s nature. Medieval theologians such as Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns
Scotus, along with modern writers such as C. S. Lewis and D. Z. Phillips, all
agree that “omnipotence” is subject to those two fundamental limitations.[ii]

So
Scripture, Tradition, and Reason all oppose the view of God as literally
omnipotent. Some theologians emphasize that God’s power is limited by God’s own
nature.[iii]
For example, God cannot will evil.[iv]
Others say the nature of reality constrains God’s power.[v] God
cannot make the world flat and round at the same time. Others argue that God
has deliberately limited God’s own jurisdiction, withdrawn divine power, in
order to let the cosmos be free and personal with a meaningful history instead
of just playing out a script or dancing like a puppet.[vi]
These are variations on a single theme. God is not literally omnipotent.

Aside
from being unbiblical and logically incoherent, equating God with absolute
power is corrupting. It deifies power, not love or relationship. It is obeisance
to the celestial dominator, the big guy in the sky, the patriarchal,
monarchical God. This is not the God of love represented by the Trinity. It is
not the Christian God revealed by Christ on the Cross. That God can also be
manifest in weakness, defeat, and suffering.[vii]

Rather
than a cosmic patriarch, the God on the cross renounces dominating or
controlling power. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams places this decision
to renounce power at the center of Christian theology. He writes, “The absence
of God’s manifest power is bound up with . . . a decision for powerlessness,
against the domination of the world by manipulation . . . a decision to live
with and within the potentially hurtful and destructive bounds of the world, a
decision not to escape.” He calls it a “decision for reality,” coming to terms
with things as they are – not passively or disengaged – but without trying to
overcome the world with power.[viii]

The
most influential Protestant theologian of the 20th Century, Karl Barth rejected
“a priori notions of omnipotence” –
that is the idea that God’s omnipotence means whatever happens is the will of
God. He maintained that the world is always threatened and often undone by the
mysterious power of Nothingness (das Nachtige)
which God did not create.

We
do not worship domination or worship because we are dominated. Once we have
clarified that point, “the problem of evil” does not appear so daunting. The first
premise simply does not hold water.[ix]
More importantly, once we get past the fixed assumption that divinity consists
of dominating power, we can think anew about who God is. We can think far more
creatively about how God responds to suffering and evil in the world. The point
of denying God’s literal and absolute omnipotence is not to get God completely
off the hook for the bad things that happen. It is to open a door to a better
understanding of how God is involved with our life of mixed joy and sorrow.

[i] D. Z. Phillips, The
Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, pp. 3-21.

[ii] Alister McGrath, Christian
Theology, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001)pp. 281-282. Phillips demonstrates that “There are countless
activities it does not make sense to attribute to God” because what God can do
depends on who or what you believe God
is. D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil
and the Problem of God, pp. 3-22..

[iii] Alister McGrath, Christain
Theology, p. 295. D. Z. Philips develops this point at some length in The Problem Of God And The Problem Of Evil.

[v] Philosophers call the restraints imposed by logic
“eternal compossibilities.” The world can be round or flat, but not both.

[vi]Alister McGrath, Christian
Theology, pp. 281-284. We will look more closely at self-limitation in the
next chapter in the context of creation. This is the most helpful understanding
of the limits of divine power for purposes of explaining suffering. See also D.
Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the
Problem of God, p. 181.

[viii] Rowan Williams, On
Christian Theology. (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2000) p. 122. J. R. R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy
is about this kind of religion. In Lord
of the Rings, there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are
threatening the good guys – but the good guys have a magical ring which gives
them vast power. The problem is that using the power will turn them into bad
guys. The power of the ring corrupts. So their goal is to destroy the ring, and
their constant moral challenge is to refrain from using it. Lord of
the Rings was written during World War II, and it has the marks of World
War II all over it. So, as we might expect, it reflects the theology of one of
the greatest theologians from that time, Reinhold Niebuhr. Notwithstanding Tolkien’s
Catholicism and Niebuhr’s Protestantism, they shared some theological
perspectives evoked by that time of crisis. Niebuhr said our greatest danger
lay not in the evil in the world but in the power used to restrain that evil.
Our own power was more dangerous than Hitler.

[ix] Alvin Plantinga observes that the argument against
faith actually depends on additional premises about what an omnipotent God can do and on what a good God will do. Plantinga’s argument is too
intricate to recount here. But suffice it to say that :

1.Omnipotence does not entail being able to do
logically inconsistent things (draw a square circle, etc.). There at least may
be good things that, as a matter of logic, cannot be preserved without also
preserving a corresponding evil (parable of the wheat and the tares situation).
The freedom to choose between good and evil is such a good thing. That freedom
depends on evil being an available option.

2.Goodness does
not require God to eradicate every evil, especially if such an evil cannot be
eradicated without also destroying something good.